ARYN AND ZEERID WATCHED first one then another shuttle peel away from the other vessel and start toward them. Zeerid cursed as their freighter began to slow.
“Are we stopping?” Aryn asked.
Zeerid nodded, licked his lips. “I think we go hot right now. I don’t want a cold ship when they spot us.”
“If you fire up the engines, their scanners will pick us up.”
“They’re going to see us anyway. Those shuttles are coming. Let’s fire her up and make our run. You ready?”
Aryn watched the shuttles close the gap between them. She nodded. “Ready.”
Zeerid pushed buttons and flipped switches. Fatman came back to life.
THE COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER SPUN in his chair. “Sir, secured communication from Darth Angral. Shall I put it through?”
“What have the shuttles found?” Malgus asked Jard.
“Not there yet, my lord.”
Vrath turned his head sideways, as if he heard better out of one ear than another.
“Anomalous reading just flared and vanished,” the scan officer said.
“Vanished?” Jard asked.
“I’m getting something else,” said the scan officer.
“Darth Malgus,” said the communication officer. “Darth Angral insists I put him through.”
“Put him through,” Malgus said irritably, and slapped the comm button. He put a wireless earpiece in his ear so Angral’s words would be heard only by him.
“What is it, my lord?”
Darth Angral’s smooth voice carried over the connection. “Malgus, how goes the patrol?”
“I am in the middle of something, Darth Angral. I beg you to be brief.”
Before Angral could reply, the scan officer said, “Engines. Sir, I think there’s a ship hiding in the Dromo’s shadow.”
“That’s it!” Vrath said. “That is them!”
“Alert the shuttles,” Jard said. “Now.”
“ENGINES READY TO BURN,” Zeerid said.
The shuttles, perhaps a kilometer or two away, either spotted them or got word of Fatman’s presence. One peeled left, the other right. Fatman’s thrusters pushed it off the freighter. Zeerid engaged the ion drives and Fatman screamed through the space between the two shuttles. He throttled the freighter’s engines to full and headed straight for the next nearest freighter.
Aryn had flown with Zeerid many times but had forgotten what an instinctive flier he was. He seemed to consult his instruments only rarely, instead relying on intuition, experience, and his own reflexes.
A bit like Force-piloting without the Force, she supposed.
Fatman twirled a spiral as it closed on the nearest freighter and pelted along its exterior.
“Give me a hug,” Zeerid muttered.
Aryn gripped the armrests of her chair, expecting the red lines of the frigates’ plasma cannons to light the sky at any moment, but no fire came. She checked the scanner. No fighters yet, either.
“What are they waiting on?” she said.
Zeerid ran Fatman along the bulkhead of the freighter, close enough that Aryn felt as if she could have reached out and touched it. She imagined the crew of the Imperial freighter ducking low as Fatman buzzed them.
“Too much traffic and we’re staying too close,” he said, whipping Fatman over and past the bridge of the freighter. “They don’t want to hit their own ships.”
JARD’S VOICE WAS TENSE with urgency. “That’s a Corellian XS freighter, my lord.”
Vrath nodded and pointed at the viewscreen. “That’s the one I told you about, Darth Malgus. Shoot him down!”
Malgus used a blast of power to throw Vrath against the far wall.
“Shut your mouth,” Malgus said to him.
“Are you speaking to me?” Angral asked in his earpiece.
Malgus had forgotten about Angral. “Of course not, my lord. Give me a moment, please.”
He muted the earpiece and eyed the viewscreen. He could not shoot the freighter down in the midst of the convoy. Valor’s armaments could inadvertently hit an Imperial ship. The frigates would be in the same situation. Their formation was designed to thwart attacks from outside the convoy, not attacks from within.
“Keep the ship on screen. Pursue at full and order the rest of the convoy to get clear.”
“Yes, my lord,” Jard said, and made it happen.
Valor’s engines fired on full and the cruiser lurched after the freighter.
Vrath climbed to his feet, favoring his side.
Possibilities played out in Malgus’s mind. With a Jedi aboard, shooting the freighter down could undermine the peace negotiations. Of course, the mere fact that a Jedi was inbound to Coruscant arguably undermined the peace process already.
Malgus stared at the viewscreen, watched the cruiser gain on the freighter. In moments he would get a clear field of fire.
The Empire needed war to thrive. He knew that.
He needed war to thrive. He knew that, too.
He had it within his power, possibly, to reignite the war.
He saw Coruscant in the viewscreen beyond the freighter and imagined it in flames.
The flashing light on his console reminded him that Darth Angral was waiting.
“Hail the freighter,” he said.
Jard looked puzzled. “I doubt they will answer.”
“Try, Commander.”
ARYN DID NOT NEED to consult her scanner display to know that the ships of the convoy were peeling away to give the cruiser and frigates a clear field of fire. Zeerid said nothing, merely handled the stick, worked the instrument panel, and occasionally consulted the scanner readout. Fatman banked hard right, jumped away from the near freighter, and covered the short gulf of empty space between it and the next. Zeerid was frog-hopping along the convoy, all while trying to get Fatman closer to the planet.
But the convoy was starting to break up. The freighters and frigates accelerated away from one another. And above them all loomed the enormous bulk of the Imperial cruiser, waiting for its chance.
“I’m running out of ships, Aryn. We have to make a run for the atmosphere.”
Before them, the glowing orb of Coruscant’s night side hung in the deep night of space. The sun crested behind the planet, and Coruscant’s horizon line lit up like it was on fire.
“Do it,” she said. “No, wait. They’re hailing us. Holo.”
“You’re kidding?”
Aryn shook her head and Zeerid activated the small transmitter mounted in his instrument panel.
A hologram of an Imperial bridge took shape. Crew sat at their stations, their images clear in the holo’s resolution. Two human men stood in the foreground, one a thin redhead in the uniform of a naval officer, one a towering, bulky figure of a man who wore a heavy black cape and whose eyes seemed to glow in the light of the bridge’s instrumentation. The eyes studied Zeerid with such intensity that it made him uncomfortable even through the holo. A respirator clung to the man’s face, covering his mouth. His pale skin looked as gray as a corpse’s.
“Power down entirely,” said the tall man, his voice as raw as an open wound. “You have five seconds.”
Aryn leaned in close to see the hologram better. The man’s eyes moved from Zeerid to her and even across the distance he felt their power. She recognized him. He had fought in the Battle of Alderaan.
“He is Sith,” Aryn said. “Darth Malgus.”
Motion behind Malgus caught Aryn’s eye, a third man, short, arms crossed across his chest. She and Zeerid almost bumped heads as they eyed the holo. Aryn recognized him. So did Zeerid, it seemed.
“That’s the man that ambushed us in the spaceport,” Zeerid said. “Vrath Xizor.”
“He alerted them we were coming.”
Zeerid stared at the holo then leaned back, eyes wide. “Stang, Aryn. That’s the same man I saw in Karson’s Park on Vulta.”
“Where?”
“He knows I have a daughter.”
“You have two seconds,” Malgus said.
Zeerid hit the TRANSMIT button. “To hell with you, Sith.”
He cut off the transmission, unleashed a rain of expletives, and put Fatman into a rapid spin that turned Aryn light-headed and would make it as difficult as possible for targeting computers to lock on.
MALGUS STARED at the holotransmitter, now dark, on which he had communicated with the freighter, the freighter that had a Jedi aboard.
Torn, he thought of Eleena, of Lord Adraas, of Angral, of the flawed Empire that was taking shape before his eyes and how it fell short of the Empire as it should be, an Empire congruent with the needs of the Force.
“They will be clear of the convoy shortly, Commander Jard,” said Lieutenant Makk, the bridge weapons officer.
Malgus watched the freighter dance among the now-separating ships of the convoy, trying to hug what vessels it could as it skipped toward Coruscant.
He thought he should shoot it down and hope that the death of a Jedi over Coruscant would destroy the peace talks and restart the war.
He should do it.
He knew he should.
“I think he’s going to try to make the planet,” Jard said. “Why doesn’t he just jump out?”
Members of the bridge crew shook their heads at the pilot’s foolishness. Were he wise, he would have jumped into hyperspace and fled.
“His need to get to the planet outweighs the risk of his getting shot down,” Malgus said, intrigued.
“All this for spice?” Jard said.
“Perhaps it is the Jedi’s need that drives them.”
“Curious,” Jard observed.
“Agreed,” Malgus said. With difficultly, he let curiosity murder temptation. “Get close enough to use the tractor beam. There is more to this than mere spicerunning.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Malgus tapped the earpiece and reopened the channel with Darth Angral.
“What is happening there?” Angral asked, his tone perturbed.
Malgus offered a half-truth. “A spicerunner is trying to get through the blockade.”
“Ah, I see.” Angral paused, then said, “I have received a communiqué from our delegation on Alderaan.”
The mere mention of the delegation caused Malgus a flash of rage, a flash that almost caused him to reconsider his decision to capture, rather than destroy, the freighter.
Angral continued: “A member of the Jedi delegation has left Alderaan without filing a flight plan and without reporting her intent to her superiors. The Jedi have reason to believe that she may be heading to Coruscant. Her activities are unauthorized by the Jedi Council and she is to be treated no differently from the spicerunner you are pursuing now.”
“She?” Malgus asked, eyeing the freighter on the viewscreen, recalling the woman he had seen in the vidscreen. “This rogue Jedi is a woman?”
“A human woman, yes. Aryn Leneer. Her actions, whatever they may be, are not to be attributed to the Jedi Council or the Republic. The Emperor wants nothing to affect the ongoing negotiations. Do you understand, Darth Malgus?”
Malgus understood all too well. “The Jedi delegation told Lord Baras of this rogue Jedi? They sacrificed one of their own to ensure that the negotiations continued smoothly?”
“Master Dar’nala herself, as I understand it.”
Malgus shook his head in disgust. He felt a hint of sympathy for Aryn Leneer. Like him, she had been betrayed by those she believed in and served. Of course, what she believed in and served was heretical.
“If this Jedi does attempt to reach Coruscant and she falls into your hands, you are to destroy her. Am I clear, Darth Malgus?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The freighter broke free of the convoy into open space and flew an evasive path toward Coruscant. Perhaps the pilot thought to escape in the planet’s atmosphere.
“Engage the tractor beam,” Commander Jard said, and Malgus did not gainsay the order.
He cut the connection with Angral.
He had disobeyed an order, taken the first step down a path he had never before trod. He still wasn’t sure why.
THERE WAS NOTHING BETWEEN Fatman and Coruscant but open space, and that meant fire would be incoming. Aryn watched the distance to the planet’s atmosphere shrink on her scanner. She sat hunched, braced against the plasma fire she knew must soon come. She thought they might make it until Fatman lurched and lost half of its velocity, throwing Aryn and Zeerid forward in their seats.
“What’s that?” Aryn said, checking the instrument panel.
“Tractor beam,” Zeerid said, and pushed down hard on the stick. Fatman dived, her nose facing the planet, and Aryn could see the night side of Coruscant, the lines of light from the urbanscape like glowing script on the otherwise dark surface.
The ship was not accelerating. Alarms wailed and Fatman’s engines screamed, battling with the tractor beam but losing decisively.
The cruiser started to reel them in.
Cursing, Zeerid cut off the engines and Fatman’s reverse motion increased noticeably. Through the canopy, Aryn watched the distant stars move past them in reverse. She imagined the cruiser’s landing bay opening as they approached, a mouth that would chew them up.
She cleared her mind, thought of Master Zallow, and readied herself to face the Sith Lord and whatever else she might find on the cruiser. She reached into her pocket, traced her fingers over the single stone she’d brought from Alderaan, the stone from the Nautolan calming bracelet Master Zallow had given her. The cool, smooth touch of it helped clear her mind.
“I’m sorry, Zeerid,” she said.
“I was coming anyway, Aryn. And you didn’t get me caught. I got you caught. And anyway don’t apologize yet.” His hands flew over the instrument panel. “No Imperial tractor beam is holding my ship. I have to get back to Vulta and my daughter.”
He ratcheted up the power to the engines, though he didn’t yet engage them. The ship vibrated as Zeerid backed up the power and held it just before the exchange manifolds, a river of energy gathering behind a dam.
“What are you going to do?” Aryn asked, though she suspected she knew.
“Shooting this cork out of the bottle,” he said, and diverted more power to the engines. He made as though he were shaking a bottle of soda water. “Get yourself strapped in, Aryn. Not just the lap. All five points.”
Aryn did so. “You could tear the ship in half,” she said. “Or the engines might blow.”
He nodded. “Or we might break loose. But for that to work, I need to get oblique to the pull at the correct moment.” He checked the scanner. “You’re not so big,” he said to the cruiser.
His even tone and steady hands did not surprise Aryn. He seemed to thrive under stress. He’d have made a decent Jedi, she imagined.
She checked the distance between the cruiser and Fatman, the speed the beam was pulling them.
“You have five seconds,” she said.
“I know.”
“Four.”
“Do you believe that’s helpful?”
“Two.”
He tapped another series of keys and the engines whined so loudly they overwhelmed the alarm.
“One second,” she said.
In her mind’s eye, she imagined Fatman snapping in two, imagined she and Zeerid perishing in the vacuum, their dying sight pieces of Fatman flaming like pyrotechnics as they cut a path through Coruscant’s atmosphere.
“And … we go!” Zeerid said.
He twisted the stick leftward at the same moment that he released all of the pent-up power into the engines.
The sudden rush arrested the backward motion of the ship and Fatman bucked like an angry rancor. Metal creaked, screamed under the stress. Somewhere deep within the ship, something burst with a hiss.
For a fraction of a second the ship hung in space, perfectly still, engines wailing, their power warring with the tractor beam’s pull. And then Fatman tore loose and streaked free. The sudden acceleration pressed Aryn and Zeerid into the back of their seats.
Fire alarms sounded. Aryn checked the board.
“Fires in the engine compartment, Zeerid.”
He was talking to himself under his breath, handling the stick, watching the scanner, and might not have heard her.
“He’s right behind us,” Zeerid said.
“Get into the atmosphere,” she said. “That cruiser has no maneuverability outside a vacuum. We can ditch somewhere, get lost in the sky traffic before they can dispatch a fighter.”
“Right,” he said, and slammed down on the stick.
Fatman dipped her nose and Coruscant once more came into view, tantalizingly close.
Smoke wafted into the cockpit from the rear, the smell of seared electronics.
“Aryn!”
“I’m on it,” she said, and started to unstrap herself.
“Chemical extinguishers are in wall mounts in every corridor.”
ON THE MAIN SCREEN, Malgus watched the freighter’s engines flare blue. The ship shook loose of the tractor beam’s noose and dived toward the planet like a blaster shot. A murmur went through the bridge crew.
“Pursue, helm,” Commander Jard said.
The helmsman engaged the engines and accelerated after the freighter.
“The tractor has failed, my lord,” Commander Jard said to Malgus, checking the command readout. “We will have it up again in moments.”
Malgus watched the freighter open some distance between it and the cruiser, and made up his mind. He had crossed a line and started down a road when he had first engaged the tractor beam. But the time was not yet right to walk farther down that road. He could not afford to let the Jedi, Aryn Leneer, get to Coruscant, lest Angral start to perceive motives in Malgus that Malgus would not yet acknowledge in himself.
“No,” he said. “They’ll be in the atmosphere in a moment. Shoot them down.”
“Very good, my lord.” Jard looked to the weapons officer. “Weapons free, Lieutenant Makk.” Jard looked to Malgus. “Shall I alert the planetary fighter wing, my lord?”
“That shouldn’t be necessary, provided Lieutenant Makk does his job.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Red lines from Valor’s plasma cannons filled the space between the ship, the fire so thick that the lines seemed to bleed together into a red plane.
ARYN GOT HALFWAY out of her seat when an explosion rocked the ship. Fatman lurched and Aryn fell to the floor.
“Back in your seat,” Zeerid said. “Weapons are hot on that cruiser.”
Aryn climbed into her seat and got the lap strap on. The moment the buckle clicked into place, Zeerid went evasive. Coruscant spun in the viewscreen as Fatman spun, wheeled, and dived. The red lines of plasma fire lit up the black of space. Zeerid went hard right, down, then left.
The ship knifed into the atmosphere.
“Divert everything but the engines and life support to the rear deflectors.”
Aryn worked the instrument panel, doing as Zeerid ordered.
Another explosion rocked the ship.
“The deflectors aren’t going to take another one,” she said.
Zeerid nodded. The orange flames of atmospheric entry were visible through the canopy. Plasma bolts knifed over them, under, to the left. Zeerid cut Fatman to the right as they descended, risking a bad entry that could burn them up.
The smoke in the cockpit thickened.
“Masks?” Aryn asked, coughing.
“There,” Zeerid responded, nodding at a ship’s locker between their seats. Aryn threw it open, grabbed two masks, tossed one to Zeerid, and pulled the other one on herself.
“You’ve got the stick,” Zeerid said while he pulled on his mask.
Aryn grabbed the copilot’s stick and continued Fatman’s spiraling descent toward Coruscant.
Fire from the cruiser hit the ship on the starboard side and caused the freighter to spin wildly. Aryn felt dizzy, sick.
“I have the stick,” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He got the spin under control and drove Fatman almost vertically into the atmosphere. The cockpit grew hot. Flames engulfed the ship. They must have looked like a comet cutting through the sky.
“Too steep,” Aryn said.
“I know,” Zeerid said. “But we’ve got to get in.”
The unrelenting fire from the cruiser struck the freighter again, the impact shoving them through the stratosphere. The flames diminished, vanished, and Coruscant was once more visible below them.
“We’re through,” Aryn said.
Without warning the engines died and Fatman went limp in the air, spinning, falling, but with no power.
Zeerid cursed, slammed his hand against the instrument panel, trying frantically to refire them, but to no avail.
“They can still hit us here,” he said, and unbuckled his belts. “I got nothing but thrusters. Get to the escape pod.”
“The cargo, Zeerid.”
He hesitated, finally shook his head and unbuckled her straps. “Forget the cargo. Move.”
She stood and another bolt hit Fatman. An explosion rocked the rear of the ship. Another. They were going down. Alarms wailed. The ship was burning, falling through the sky. Zeerid hit the control panel to engage the thrusters and keep the ship in the air.
For the moment, at least.
“THEY ARE DEAD IN THE AIR,” Lieutenant Makk announced. “Drifting on thrusters.”
Commander Jard looked to Malgus for the kill order. Vrath, too, looked on with interest.
The freighter hung low over Coruscant’s atmosphere. It limped along on thrusters, trailing flames from its dead ion engines. They could rope them back in with the tractor.
“Shoot them down,” Malgus ordered.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vrath smile and cross his arms over his chest.
EXPLOSIONS IN THE REAR of Fatman started to spread, the secondary explosions working their way forward in a series of dull booms. They would never make it to the escape pod.
Aryn activated her lightsaber. “Grab hold of something.”
“What are you doing?”
“Getting us out.”
“What?”
She did not bother to explain. Bracing herself and holding on to her seat strap, she stabbed her blade through the transparisteel of the cockpit canopy and opened a gash. The oxygen rushed out of the cockpit while the pressure equalized. Their masks allowed them to breathe, despite the thin atmosphere. The cold startled Aryn.
She used her blade to cut a door out of the canopy. The thin air whipped by, whistling.
“We’re fifty kilometers up, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice rising for the first time. “The velocity alone—”
She grabbed him by the arm and gave him a shake to shut him up. “Do not let go of me no matter what. Do you understand? No matter what.”
His eyes were wide behind the lenses of his mask. He nodded.
She did not hesitate. She sank into the Force, cocooned them both in a protective sheath, and leapt out of the ship and into the open air.
The wind and velocity tore them backward. They slammed into the ship’s fuselage and whipped through the flames pouring out its sides. At almost the same moment, plasma fire from the cruiser above them hit Fatman dorsally and the ship exploded into an expanding ball of flame. The blast wave sent them careering crazily through the sky and set them to spinning like a pinwheel. For an alarming moment, Aryn’s vision blurred and she feared she would lose consciousness, but she held on to awareness with both hands and fought through it.
Zeerid was shouting but Aryn could not make it out.
Her stomach crawled up her throat as they plummeted, spinning wildly, toward the planet below. Her perspective alternated crazily from flaming pieces of Fatman, to Coruscant below, to the sky above and the distant silhouette of the Imperial cruiser, to Fatman again. The motion was pulling the blood from her head. Sparks blinked before her eyes. She had to stop the spinning or she would pass out.
She made her grip a vise around Zeerid and used the Force first to slow, then to stop the spin. They ended up hand in hand, passing through clouds, falling at terminal velocity toward Coruscant’s surface.
MALGUS WATCHED the freighter disintegrate into flaming debris over Coruscant. He expected the faint touch of the Jedi’s Force signature to disintegrate with it, but he felt it still.
“Magnify,” he said, leaning forward in the command chair. The image on the viewscreen grew larger.
Chunks of jagged steel and a large portion of the forward section of the ship burned their way toward the surface.
“Did an escape pod launch before the ship exploded?”
“No, my lord,” Jard said. “There were no survivors.”
But there had been. The Jedi, at least, had survived. He could still feel her presence, though it was fading with distance, a splinter in the skin of his perception.
He considered dispatching fighters, a search party, but decided against it. He was not yet sure what he would do about the Jedi, but whatever it was, he would do it himself.
“Very good, Commander Jard. Well done, Lieutenant Makk.” He turned to Vrath. “You are done here, Vrath Xizor.”
Vrath shifted on his feet, swallowed, cleared his throat. “You mentioned the possibility of payment, my lord?”
Malgus credited him with bravery, if nothing else. Malgus rose and walked over. He stood twenty centimeters taller than Vrath but the smaller man held his ground and kept most of the fear from the slits of his eyes.
“It is not enough that you’ve killed a rival and destroyed the engspice your employer wished to prevent reaching the surface?”
“I did not—”
Malgus held up a gloved hand. “The petty squabbles of criminals hold little interest for me.”
Vrath licked his lips, drew himself up straight. “I brought you a Jedi, my lord. That was her on the holo.”
“So you did.”
“Will I … be paid, then?”
Malgus regarded him coolly, and the small man seemed to withdraw into himself. The fear in his eyes expanded, the knowledge that he was a lone prey animal surrounded by predators.
“I am a man of my word,” Malgus said. “You will be paid.”
Vrath let out a long breath. “Thank you, my lord.”
“You may take your ship to the planet. The coordinates will be provided to you and I will arrange for payment there.”
“And then I can leave?”
Malgus smiled under his respirator. “That is a different question.”
Vrath took half a step back. He looked as if he had been slapped. “What does that mean? I … will not be allowed to leave?”
“No unauthorized ships may leave Coruscant at this time. You will remain on the planet until things change.”
“But, my lord—”
“Or I can blow your ship from space the moment it leaves my landing bay,” Malgus said.
Vrath swallowed hard. “Thank you, my lord.”
Malgus waved him away. Security escorted him from the bridge.
AFTER THE CHAOS OF THE COCKPIT, the quiet of the fall seemed oddly incongruous. Aryn heard only the rush of the wind, the steady thump of her heartbeat in her ears. Zeerid’s fear was a tangible thing to her, and it fell with them.
She felt free, exhilarated, and the feeling surprised her. To the east Coruscant’s surface curved away from them and the morning sun crept over the horizon line, bathing the planet in gold. The sight took her breath away. She shook Zeerid’s arm and nodded at the rising sun. He did not respond. His eyes stared straight down, iron to the magnet of the planet’s surface. Aryn allowed herself to enjoy the view for a few seconds before trying to save their lives.
The drag increased as the thin air of the upper atmosphere gave way to the thicker, breathable air of the lower. Below them, Coruscant transformed from a brown-and-black ball crisscrossed with seemingly random whorls of light, to a distinguishable geometry of well-lit cities, roads, skyways, quadrants, and blocks. She could make out tiny black forms moving against the urbanscape, the ants of aircars, speeders, and swoops, but far fewer than ordinary. Plumes of smoke traced twisting black lines into the air. Large areas of Galactic City lay in ruins, dark lesions on the skin of the planet.
The Empire must have killed tens of thousands. More, perhaps.
The wind changed pitch, whistled past her ears. She fancied she heard whispers in it, the soul of the planet sharing its pain. Her clothing flapped audibly behind her.
Below, she could distinguish more and more details of Coruscant’s upper levels: the lines of skyscrapers, the geometry of plazas and parks, the orderly, straight lines of roads.
She let herself feel the descent and used the feeling to fall into the Force. Nestled in its power, she marshaled her strength. She pulled Zeerid toward her. Unresisting, he felt as limp as a rag doll in her hands. She drew him to her, under her, wrapped her arms and legs around him.
“Ready yourself,” she shouted in his ear. “Nod if you understand.”
His head bobbed once, tense and rapid.
The buildings below grew larger, more defined. They descended toward a large plaza, a flat trapezoid of duracrete with stratoscrapers anchoring each of its corners.
“I will slow us,” she shouted. “But we will still hit with some force. I will release you before we hit. Try to roll with the impact.”
He nodded again.
She lowered her head, angled her body, and tried to use the wind resistance to create some slight motion forward, rather than entirely downward. The ground rushed up to meet them.
They passed through the ring of skyrises, plummeting past the roofs, windows, balconies. Given the hour, she doubted anyone saw their descent.
She reached out with the Force, channeled power into a wide column beneath them. She conceptualized the power as somewhat similar to what she would use when augmenting a leap, except that instead of a sudden rush of power to drive her upward, she instead used the power in a gentler, passive fashion. She imagined it as a balloon, soft and yielding at first, but providing ever-increasing resistance as they fell farther into it.
They slowed and Zeerid shifted in her grasp. Perhaps he did not believe it.
Pressure built behind Aryn’s eyes, an ache formed in her head.
The balloon of her power slowed them further. She could see benches in the plaza, a fountain. She could distinguish individual windows in the skyrises around them. They were five hundred meters up and still falling fast.
The pressure in her brain intensified. Her vision blurred. The ache in her head became a knife stab of pain. She screamed but held on, held on.
Four hundred meters. Three hundred.
They slowed still more and Aryn feared she could not bear any more.
Two hundred.
A second stretched into an eternity of pain and pressure. She thought she must burst.
“Hang on, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He was rigid in her arms.
Fifty meters.
They were still going too fast.
Twenty, ten.
She dug deep, pulled out what power she could, and expended it in a final shout, an expulsion of power that entirely arrested their descent for a moment. They hung in the air for a fraction of a second, suspended only by the invisible power of the Force and Aryn’s ability to use it.
And then they were falling free.
She released Zeerid and they both hit the duracrete feetfirst, the shock of impact sending jolts of pain up Aryn’s ankles and calves. She rode the momentum of the fall into a roll that knocked the wind from her and tore a divot of skin from her scalp.
But she was alive.
She lifted herself to all fours, every muscle screaming, legs quivering, blood dripping from her scalp. She tore off her mask.
“Zeerid!”
“I’m all right,” he answered, his voice as raw as old leather. “I can’t believe it, but I am all right.”
She sagged back to the duracrete, rolled over onto her back, and stared up at dawn’s light spreading across the sky. The long thin clouds, painted with the light of daybreak, looked like veins of gold. She simply lay there, exhausted.
Zeerid crawled over to her, cursing with pain throughout. He peeled off his mask and lay on his back next to her. They stared up at the sky together.
“Is anything broken?” she asked him.
He turned to look at her, shook his head, looked back at the sky. “If we get out of this, I’m becoming a farmer on Dantooine. I swear it.”
She smiled.
“I’m not joking.”
She held her smile; he began to chuckle, louder, and the chuckle turned into a laugh.
She could not help it. A wide smile split her face, followed by a chuckle, and then she joined him in full, both of them giggling hysterically at the dawn sky of a new day.
VRATH’S HANDS SWEATED on Razor’s stick. Despite Malgus purporting to be a man of his word, Vrath felt certain the Imperial cruiser would shoot him from space after he exited the landing bay. For a moment, he considered veering off deeper insystem, accelerating to full to get out of Coruscant’s gravity well, then jumping into hyperspace, but he did not think he would make it.
More important, he feared that even if he did make it, Malgus would hunt him down on principle. Vrath knew that Malgus would do it because Vrath would have done the same. He’d looked into the Sith Lord’s eyes and seen the same relentlessness he tried to cultivate in his own. He would not cross Malgus.
He let the ship’s autopilot ride the coordinates provided to him by Valor into Coruscant’s atmosphere. It would put him down in one of Galactic City’s smaller spaceports, probably one commandeered by Imperial soldiers.
Presently, the spaceport hailed him and sent him landing instructions. He affirmed them and sat back in his chair.
He resolved that he would not leave Razor once he put down on Coruscant. He wanted no further interaction with conquering Imperials. He wanted only to wait until peace negotiations on Alderaan were concluded, however long that might take, and then get off Coruscant.
MALGUS KNEW ARYN LENEER had somehow survived the destruction of her ship and he suspected she had survived the descent to Coruscant’s surface. He did not want Angral to learn of her escape. Such knowledge would be … premature.
He would need to track her down. To do that, he needed to determine why she had returned to Coruscant in the first place.
“I will be in my quarters,” he said to Commander Jard.
“If anything requires your attention, I will alert you immediately.”
When he reached his quarters, he found Eleena sleeping. Her blasters, tucked into their holsters, lay on the bed beside her. She slept with one hand on them. He watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, the half smile she wore even while sleeping. She had shed the sling on her arm.
Staring at her, he acknowledged to himself that he cared for her. Deeply.
And that, he knew, was his weakness.
He stared at her and thought of the Twi’lek servant woman he had murdered in his youth …
He realized that his fists were clenched.
Shaking his head, he closed the door to the room in which Eleena slept and started up the portcomp at his work desk. He wanted to learn more of Aryn Leneer, so he linked to several Imperial databases and input her name.
Her picture came up first. He studied her image, her eyes. She reminded him of Eleena. But she looked different from the woman he had seen on the vidscreen on Valor’s bridge. The change was in her eyes. They’d grown harder. Something had happened to her in the interim.
He scrolled through the file.
She was a Force empath, he saw. An orphan from Balmorra, taken into the Jedi academy as a child. He scrolled deeper into her file and there found her motivation.
A picture of Master Ven Zallow stared out of the screen at Malgus, a day-old ghost.
Aryn Leneer had been Master Zallow’s Padawan. Zallow had raised her from childhood.
He scrolled back up to Aryn’s image. Back then, her green eyes had held no guile, no edge. He could tell by looking at her that she left herself too open to pain. Her Force empathy would have only increased her sensitivity.
He leaned back in the chair.
She had felt her Master die, had felt Malgus drive his blade through him.
That was what had changed her, changed her so much that she had abandoned her Order and rushed across space to Coruscant.
Why?
He saw the faint reflection of his own face in the compscreen, superimposed over hers. His eyes, dark and deeply set in the black pits of his sockets. Her eyes, green, soft, and gentle.
But not anymore.
They were the same, he realized. They had both loved and their love had brought them pain. In a flash of understanding, he knew why she had come to Coruscant.
“She is looking for me,” he said.
She would not know she was looking for him because she had no way to know who had killed her Master. But she had come to Coruscant to find out, to avenge Zallow.
Where would she go first?
He thought he knew.
He inhaled deeply, tapped his finger on the edge of the desk.
She was hunting him. He admired her for that. It seemed very … unlike a Jedi.
Of course, Malgus would not sit idle while she sought him out.
He would hunt her.